The Secret of Saturn’s Rings by Donald A. Wollheim Page A

out, “Apollo is in sight, sir!”
    Rhodes sprang to the viewing port. Bruce could see nothing save the usual mass of stars and lights, but evidently the trained eye of the pilot had spotted a new one. The engineer squinted a minute, looked up. “To stations!” he called.
    Bruce and Arpad dashed back to the posts that had been assigned them on such occasions. Arpad was stationed near the engines to watch for any trouble. Bruce was located by the airlock to be able to take any necessary steps that an emergency might call for. Fortunately for him, it was also located near a port from which he could see most of what was going on.
    He felt the ship changing course as the gyroscopic controls swung it about. He felt a series of jets blast against the body of the vessel as it worked in for a landing.
    Now he could see the tiny disk of white which was the oncoming asteroid. Apollo was a very tiny one, he knew, but one of those that came close to Earth’s orbit. It swung back and forth in his view as the ship switched in toward it.
    Gradually it assumed shape, and he saw to his surprise that it was not a sphere as he had always assumed planetary bodies to be. Instead, it seemed to be a huge chunk of rock, irregular in shape, rather like a big boulder, longer on one side than on the other, and slowly swinging end over end on itself.
    For a moment Bruce was puzzled until he remembered his school studies in astronomy. He realized then that Apollo could not be more than a few miles wide, and its own internal gravity therefore much too weak to pull it into a spherical shape when it was originally formed, hot and molten. It had cooled off too quickly to become anything more than an irregular mass of barren rock.
    Landing on Apollo was tricky as a result. It was not a question of skimming in on a smooth surface. Rather it was a swinging about, gauging the weird swing of its sharp edges, dodging under one huge overhanging jagged end and swooping down into a valley scooped out of one side.
    It took a couple of hours for the dodging and twisting landing to be made, during all of which time Bruce was glued breathlessly to the port, watching the mass of gleaming gray and white streaked rock fill the view, move suddenly into them as if they were going to fall violently against it, suddenly swing away with dizzying speed, then level off, shift again and again. It was like watching a landscape go mad as the dwarfed space ship edged up against the free-moving mass of rock, a mass probably not larger than the Island of Manhattan, yet a world of its own. And then the Apollo landscape leveled off and the ship touched surface with unexpected gentleness, and stopped.
    They had made their first hitchhike safely.

CHAPTER 6  Tampered Charts
    Apollo was a strange place. When everything had been made shipshape, Jennings and Bruce were given leave to go outside and explore the little world. Their trip would not be just for fun; there were very practical reasons.
    For one thing, as Dr. Rhodes explained to everyone shortly after their landing, there was a very specific and limited length of time which they would stay. Apollo was moving outward toward the orbit of Mars. At a certain point it would come within a few hundred thousand miles of another asteroid. This asteroid would be at its own nearest point to the sun. They would then transfer there, ride that body out almost to Jupiter’s orbit and finally be able to leap to Hidalgo.
    Bruce asked if Mars would be near them at any time, but Garcia shook his head. The navigator said, “Mars happens to be on the other side of the sun at the moment. We may pass its orbit, but if we wanted to meet Mars we’d have a wait of more than a year before it came around to where we’d be.”
    “But what would happen if we failed to make one of our jumps on time?” Bruce then asked.
    There was a silence for a few minutes. Garcia frowned. “It would be very serious. We’d